The Catastrophe Systematic Risk of the Labs By Brian Simpson
One issue raised by the lab release hypothesis for the origin of Covid, is that the Wuhan lab is not the only one playing with dangerous pathogens. This is occurring around the world, as “gain-of-function” research is conducted as a supposed way of preparing us for the next natural pandemic, while the real danger comes from the Dr Frankenstein experiments themselves, conducted by the mad scientists, guided by the military industrial complex. Maybe Covid is entirely engineered for social control purposes, but there is no guarantee that there really could not be a doomsday bug escape sometime.
“I do not claim to know where the COVID-19 virus originated. And, I don’t think we will ever know for sure. But claims and counterclaims about its origin highlight a systemic problem that goes far beyond the details of this debate. In this case, those positing a possible laboratory origin believe that scientists manipulating coronaviruses for research purposes may have carelessly let one of their altered viruses infect them. The scientists then unknowingly carried the virus out of the lab and into the streets of China.
What’s important about this scenario—and again, we have no definitive evidence it happened—is that it could occur in any of the special laboratories worldwide which study dangerous infectious diseases. A recent report highlighting the problem listed 59 biosafety level 4 labs (the highest level), a tally that includes those planned and under construction. Some 42 are believed to be currently operating. These labs “are designed and built to work safely and securely with the most dangerous bacteria and viruses that can cause serious diseases and for which no treatment or vaccines exist.” (For a very brief primer on biosafety levels, read this.)
So, how closely are these labs monitored? The report continues, “There is, however, currently no requirement to report these facilities internationally, and no international entity is mandated to collect such information and provide oversight at a global level. Moreover, there are no binding international standards for safe, secure, and responsible work on pathogens in maximum containment labs.”
Only one lab needs to make one mistake with a serious and easily communicable disease for which there is no treatment to inflict a catastrophe on the world population.
The key element not present in other risky pursuits is that viruses and bacteria self-propagate, that is, they reproduce themselves independently of our efforts, thus spreading themselves in human populations. And, that spread is something that we’ve made so exceptionally efficient in our hyperconnected world that infectious micro-organisms will be forgiven for believing that our modern societies were designed by a virus for the convenience of viruses and other infectious agents.
In all the furor over laboratory safety, few people understand that we have taken other organisms genetically altered by humans and intentionally spread them worldwide with virtually no safety testing beforehand. These organisms are called genetically engineered crops and animals. We are now undergoing a global uncontrolled experiment to see how they affect 1) the health of humans and animals to which we are feeding these crops and 2) habitats which are impacted by the spread of novel engineered genes to wild and domesticated plants through pollen.
The champions of this kind of unbridled risk-tasking cannot guarantee that there will no catastrophic consequences. But they do say that the risk of any real and significant problem is a million to one—or some such number.
First, only closed games of chance such as roulette can ever offer such statistical measurements for risk because all the variables are known. Second, even events that are rare happen if enough opportunities arise. In a game of Russian roulette, a hypothetical gun with a million bullets in its chambers will in all likelihood not kill you if you pull the trigger once or twice. But if you pull it one million times, you will almost certainly perish. And, that is what we are doing in the field of genetically modified organisms which carry with them the risk of systemic ruin because they are self-propagating and because we have deployed them worldwide. Now, we are pulling the trigger on a daily basis hoping that nothing really bad happens.
Both biosafety labs and genetically engineered crops and livestock create the possibility of catastrophic systemic ruin for human societies. Even though we take the former less seriously than we should, we recognize the possibility of ruin resulting from carelessness. The possibility of ruin caused by the effects of genetically engineered crops barely registers as a concern in our society.
The world has already experienced a lot of people contracting and dying from the Ebola virus in very short order. We don’t need convincing that Ebola and other similar infectious agents are dangerous. But general societal ruin resulting from the effects of genetically engineered organisms used for food and fiber may happen slowly at first and only after a considerable period catastrophically undermine our food system.
Both cases above are examples of biohazards. We should keep that in mind the next time the media touts another advance in genetic engineering.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/six-vials-smallpox-discovered-us-lab
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-scientists-leaks-biolabs.html
“The theory that COVID-19 might be the result of scientific experiments has thrown a spotlight on the work of the world's most secure biolabs.
While the evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China is strictly circumstantial, a number of experts want tougher controls on such facilities over fears that accidental leaks could touch off the next pandemic.
Here's what you should know.
59 top facilities
The Wuhan lab belongs to the most secure class, commonly referred to as biosafety level 4, or BSL4.
These are built to work safely and securely with the most dangerous bacteria and viruses that can cause serious diseases for which there are no known treatment or vaccines.
"There are HVAC filtration systems, so that the virus can't escape through exhaust; any waste water that leaves the facility is treated with either chemicals or high temperatures to make sure that there's nothing alive," Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, told AFP.
The researchers themselves are highly trained and wear hazmat suits.
There are 59 such facilities across the world, according to a report Koblentz co-authored that was released this week.
"There are no binding international standards for safe, secure, and responsible work on pathogens," the report, called Mapping Maximum Biological Containment Labs Globally, said.
Accidents do happen
Accidents can happen, sometimes at the top tier facilities, and much more frequently at lower rung labs of which there are thousands.
Human H1N1 virus—the same flu that caused the 1918 pandemic—leaked in 1977 in the Soviet Union and China and spread worldwide.
In 2001, a mentally disturbed employee at a US biolab mailed out anthrax spores across the country, killing five people.
Two Chinese researchers exposed to SARS in 2004 spread the disease to others, killing one.
In 2014, a handful of smallpox vials were uncovered during an Food and Drug Administration office move.
Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, has been sounding the alarm for many years about the public safety threats posed by such facilities.
"Human errors constitute over 70 percent of the errors in laboratories," he told AFP, adding that US researchers have to rely on data from Freedom of Information requests to learn of these incidents.
'Gain of function' controversy
There is disagreement between the US government, which funded bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, and some independent scientists, about whether this work was controversial "gain of function" (GOF) research.
GOF research entails modifying pathogens to make them more transmissible, deadlier, or better able to evade treatment and vaccines—all to learn how to fight them better.
This field has long been contentious. Debate reached a fever pitch when two research teams in 2011 showed they could make bird flu transmissible between mammals.
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told AFP he was concerned "that it would create a strain of virus that if it infected a laboratory worker could not just kill that laboratory worker... but also cause a pandemic."
"The research is not required and does not contribute to the development of drugs or vaccines," added molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, one of the staunchest opponents of this kind of research.
In 2014 the US government announced a pause in federal funding for such work, which gave way in 2017 to a framework that would consider each application on a case-by-case basis.
But the process has been criticized as lacking transparency and credibility.
As late as last year, a nonprofit received funding from the US on research to "predict spillover potential" of bat coronavirus to humans in Wuhan.
Questioned by Congress this week, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health denied this amounted to gain of function research, but Ebright said it clearly does.
The path ahead
None of this means that COVID-19 definitely leaked from a lab—in fact there is no hard scientific evidence in favor of natural origin or lab accident scenario, said Ebright.
But there are certain lines of circumstantial evidence in favor of the latter. For instance, Wuhan is around 1,000 miles north of bat caves that harbor the ancestor virus, well out of the animals' flight range.
Scientists from Wuhan were however known to be carrying out routine trips to those caves to take samples.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist from the Broad Institute, said there were no signs of risky pathogen research dying down in the wake of the pandemic—in fact "it's possibly expanded."
Last year, Chan published research showing that, unlike SARS, SARS-CoV-2 was not evolving fast when it was first detected in humans—another piece of circumstantial evidence that could point to lab origin.
Chan considers herself a "fence-sitter" on the competing hypotheses, but does not favor banning risky research, fearing it would then go underground.
One solution "might just be as simple as moving these research institutes out into extremely remote areas...where you have to quarantine for two weeks before we re-enter in human society," she said.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-50137
“SARS escaped Beijing lab twice
Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny
The latest outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China, with eight confirmed or suspected cases so far and hundreds quarantined, involves two researchers who were working with the virus in a Beijing research lab, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday (April 26).
“We suspect two people, a 26-year-old female postgraduate student and a 31-year-old male postdoc, were both infected, apparently in two separate incidents,” Bob Dietz, WHO spokesman in Beijing, told The Scientist.
The woman was admitted to hospital on April 4, but the man apparently became infected independently 2 weeks later, being hospitalized on April 17. Both worked at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing, part of China's Center for Disease Control.
At a news conference in Manila this morning, Associated Press reported, WHO Western Pacific Regional Director Shigeru Omi criticized the laboratory's safeguards and said the authorities did not know yet whether any foreigners had been carrying out medical research in the facility and had since left the country. Laboratory safety “is a serious issue that has to be addressed,” he said. “We have to remain very vigilant.”
China has level three research guidelines and rules in place for handling the SARS virus, which are “of acceptable quality” to WHO, Dietz told The Scientist. But “it's a question of procedures and equipment. Frankly we are going to go in now a take a very close look,” he said.
“We have a team of two or three international experts that's arriving in a day or two. They are going to go into the labs with Ministry of Health people and find out what happened here,” Dietz said.
“We've been told we'll have full access, be able to test all the surfaces, interview people who worked there, and look at documentation to find out what was being done,” Dietz said. “We're not releasing the names of the experts yet, but once you see the names you'll recognize them. They will be international experts from the relevant disciplines.”
In the meantime, the lab has been closed, and the 200 staff have been put in isolation in a hotel near another lab in Cham Ping, about 20 kilometers North of Beijing. China is rushing its own investigative teams to check lab security, according to state media.
Antoine Danchin, an epidemiologist with the Hong Kong University–Pasteur Research Center, who studied the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, told The Scientist the latest incidents were probably the result of lab accidents.
“Normally, it's not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement, if the security rules are obeyed, with the appropriate hoods, and so on,” Danchin said. SARS work requires level three. “So it suggests there has been some mishandling of something.”
“The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply! For example, notebooks are not supposed to be taken out, a lot of things like that. A virus doesn't jump on people!” Danchin said.However WHO Beijing is relatively sanguine about the current threat, despite the fact that the 26-year-old infected had taken a long journey on the country's rail network. The index cases are known, and contacts had been traced, Dietz said. “We see no significant public health threat at this point.”
Humanity faces a threat from the Dr Frankenstein scientist and technocrats, as deadly as any posed by the financial elites. The science/technocrats seem to have some degree of autonomy from their commanders, and thus can create disaster all of their own, due to their hubris and intellectual arrogance, which dwarfs the power-mad elites. It is a nightmare world, and a miracle it has not destroyed itself yet.
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